Dismissed soldier wanted ‘to do something important for my country’

OTTAWA – All Cpl. David Hawkins wanted was to serve in the Canadian military, even at the age of 18.

“It was all I knew, right? I joined up in high school.”

Hawkins was deployed as a combat engineer in Afghanistan from September 2008 to April 2009. It was there that the extreme conditions of his position began to take their toll. In 2009 he was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and sent into recovery.

Now, at the age of 26, he faces a future outside the institution he had hoped to serve for many years. He was released from service Oct. 25 of this year.

Hawkins said he was offered many pills, but few options for continued service in the military. If he had been allowed to stay in recovery for one more year, he would have been eligible to collect a pension from the military.

When he was first diagnosed with PTSD in 2009 he was given a lump sum payment, a small percentage of his pension contributions, Hawkins said. He wouldn’t give an exact number but said his payout was not a very large amount. At the time he wasn’t thinking about the future. “I’m not going to lie, I spent it on ridiculous stuff,” Hawkins said.

Although he didn’t want to be stuck at a desk job, Hawkins said he still wanted to serve in the military. He wanted to train to become a military firefighter and continue to serve, though that’s no longer possible.

“It’s just a soldier’s mentality. I want to do something important for my country.”

Hawkins said that while in recovery he wasn’t kept well-informed of what his status in the military was. One day he was summoned in to sign his release papers.

This was because Hawkins didn’t fulfill the universality of service rule, which states that members have to be ready for active deployment overseas at all times.

His time limit for recovery had run out.

“When you talk to anyone about PTSD, there’s no time limit — it’s a process,” Hawkins said.

Hawkins said he has filed a grievance, but these can take up to four years to review.

For the near term he doesn’t know what to do. Hawkins currently has a high-school level education, and though the military would pay for firefighter training he said doesn’t know if he would find a job.

“They’re going to look at my medical record and go ‘wow, we can’t take this guy on.'”

He thinks there may be a future for him in advocating for veteran’s rights.